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HD Replay

I've been missing this feature since wip3out. I was hoping it would be in the HD feature list, but unfortunately its not

Theres something very satisfying about watching a perfect race from carefully chosen trackside camera angles that not only show the quality of the environments from different perspectives, but also how busy they are (stuff that pilots would miss whilst playing the game). I assume this was ommited due to time restrictions rather than platform specifications (correct me if im wrong here). Its a 'must' for the next wipeout game. Its typical, specially for circuit based racing games to have this feature.

Definitely missing it to, yeah. Especially because of WOHD's improved photo mode. I doubt I would stop during a race very often to get a shot of the situation. If there's a reply, on the other hand, you can watch specific situations as often as you want and thus use the photo mode to its fullest.

totally agree. as cool as the new photo mode is, it's basically useless without a replay function. The situations you want to capture on a photo are the hefty battles in online multiplayer, but you can't pause the game and take a snapshot. The only way to do it is with a replay. Who knows, maybe they find a way to add it as a download later on.

Replays are MAJORLY missed in recent Wipeout games-- not only for fun but also for sharing strategies and time trial proofing.

I can appreciate the lack of replays for multiplayer and single race modes due to the amount of information that the console has to save and re-display. What I don't understand is the lack of replays for Speed Lap and Time Trial events, given that there are replays of such things in pretty simple Game Boy and SNES games.

Here's hoping that replays will make an appearance in future iterations of Wipeout

That's one of the features that i'd gladly give up Photo mode for.... replay would be awesome, but what would be even better would be the ability to save your replays as AVI's or MP4's etc. That would be brilliant!

And maybe there are just not enough resources to do the replay. Sure, in Time Trial there is some kind of reply, but only for one ship.
In Single races there is much more information to save. There are eight ships colliding with the track surface and the other crafts. There are weapon fired. Flashing weapon pads. And then there is the whole track with its animations.

A reply needs the information of everything that's going on in a race - that's 3-5 minutes. A ghost in Time Trial only needs the data of one ship.

As far as I understand the issue of replays in a game with a rather sophisticated physics engine, I can only draw conclusions from what Bungie stated about the saved films feature of Halo 3:
The game can only record the input of your controller (and of the AI), but the effect in-game runs through the physics engine. Now the problem is that you can't rewind the effect of the physics engine - that's why you can't rewind Halo's saved films. But even for an un-rewindable replay, the physics engine doesn't act exactly the same way every time (like in real life, you just cannot exactly replicate a situation) - that's why in a game with more complicated physics it can mess up the whole replay.
Imagine a bomb explosion next to your ship that slightly pushes you to one side. You react to the push, re-adjust your racing line, the race continues. Now, in the replay, the physics-based push effect might not push you exactly as far or exactly in the same direction. Your re-adjusting controller input is still in there, though, and so your ship takes on a different line - even if only by an inch - than it did in the actual race. These things add up and all of a sudden your ship is off track. AFAIK, this is the main reason for not having replays, since it would be impossible to record every particle of every physics effect in the game.